Agrobiodiversity, community participation and landscapes in agroecology

Maintaining and managing agrobiodiversity is a key issue proposed by agroecology, not only to maintain high agricultural productivity, but also to increase the resilience, stability and sustainability of the agroecosystems, meant as the functional relationship between the natural assets and the human use of them, at farm and farm matrix scale. The main hypothesis of this approach is that, the greater the interactions between organisms of different trophic levels (edaphic organisms, multiple crops, weed plants, herbivores, carnivores, plants in living fences, corridors or forest patches within agroecosystems), the greater will be the possibilities of obtaining abundant and varied harvests, with fewer external inputs (pesticides, fertilizers) and better environmental performance. The agrobiodiversity is meant as the variety and the disposition of the cultivations, pastures, farms, that affect the soil properties and create habitat diversity, landscape diversity and connectivity. At the level of landscapes or territories, the set of biodiverse agroecosystems generate natural matrices that have a powerful impact on the recovery and restoration of forest corridors, which, in turn, positively influence many ecosystem services for nature conservation and free movement and recovery of many populations of animal species, including those in danger of extinction. Ecological connectivity, a topic of special concern for conservation biology, is also positively affected by these biodiverse agroecosystems. In this sense, agroecology offers different tools to approach the landscape, expressed, for example, in the measurement of the main agroecological structure of the farms, which has been positioned as a form of dialogue with the ecology of the landscape. This dialogue between sciences gives ecological connectivity a complementary focus, because it makes peasants and farmers visible as the main actors of the territory.